The needle on the dosimeter had stopped moving.
It was pegged hard against the plastic stop, a static line of condemnation that refused to flicker.
Kaelen sat in the shadow of a massive ventilation intake, his back against the vibrating iron. He peeled off his left glove. The movement was slow, the fabric sticking to the skin. Beneath, the flesh was red and tight and shiny, like wax left too close to a forge fire. He touched his hairline with a trembling hand. A clump of black hair came away between his fingers, silent and effortless. It didn't hurt. That was the horror of it. The nerves were dying before the rest of him. The body was simply letting go of its constituent parts, surrendering to the entropy of the Canker.
He dropped the hair into the gutter. It floated on a stream of gray sludge, swirling around the bloated carcass of a drowned rat before vanishing into the darkness of the lower grates.
Iodine, he calculated. His mind was a cold machine even as his cells unraveled. Chelating agent. A full cellular scrub. Or total organ failure in twelve hours. The heart will be the last to stop, but the lungs will turn to soup first.
He pushed off the brickwork. Every step sent a jolt of nausea through his gut, a wet, heavy feeling that tasted of bile and copper.
District 9 was waking up. The shift whistles blew from the factories in the Upper Ribs—a mournful, discordant sound that vibrated the massive chains suspending the shantytown. Men and women shuffled out of their tin hovels, their eyes dull and rimmed with soot. They moved in silence, a shuffling tide of the damned, murmuring the morning prayer to the Accord to keep the floor solid and the air breathable.
They didn't look at Kaelen. In the Ribs, you didn't look at a man who walked like a corpse. You stepped over him. You let the shadows claim what was already theirs.
The Hunter's Calculus
Vesper knelt on the rusted catwalk of the Sector 4 airlock, three hundred meters above the slums.
The metal was slick with morning condensation and the grime of the city. She ignored the view of the abyss below, the way the clouds of smog churned like a gray sea. Her attention was fixed on a small, drying puddle of bile near the railing. She dipped a gloved finger into it. She brought the digit close to her helmet's sensors, watching the data-stream flicker across her HUD.
High radiation count. Traces of stomach acid. Hemoglobin. "He's sick," she said. Her voice was low, a private resonance within the ceramic shell of her helmet.
She stood up. A group of dockworkers watched her from the shadows of a crane, their faces hidden behind grease-stained rags. They held pry-bars and heavy wrenches—the weapons of the desperate.
They saw a lone White-Blood officer and they were doing the math of violence, weighing the value of her armor against the cost of their lives.
Vesper turned her head slowly. The visor of her helmet was a blank, white curve that reflected their own fear back at them. She adjusted the grip on her hydraulic hammer. She didn't raise it. She simply let the weight of the tungsten head rest on the grating.
Clang.
The sound was heavy. Absolute. It vibrated through the metal, traveling up the workers' legs and into their teeth. The math changed instantly. They saw not a woman, but a physical law.
"You," Vesper said, pointing a gauntlet at the largest man. "A rat came through here twenty minutes ago. Limping. Where did he go?"
The man hesitated. He looked at his friends. He looked at the hammer. He saw the black ichor still staining Vesper's chestplate from the Canker's tendrils.
"Down," the man rasped. "Toward the Sumps. He looked like he was melting, Paladin. I wouldn't go after him. The rot is catching. It's a judgment."
"Melting," Vesper repeated.
She looked toward the Sumps—the lowest point of the Ribs, where the waste gathered and the air was too thick to breathe without a specialized filter. A logical place for a dying animal to hide. But this animal had used liquid nitrogen to breach a high-security terminal. This animal understood thermodynamics. He wouldn't go to the Sumps to die. He would go to a mechanic to be fixed.
"Thank you," Vesper said.
She began to walk—not toward the Sumps, but toward the apothecary district. The workers parted like water. She didn't hurry. A dying man leaves a trail of heat and blood. A desperate man makes mistakes.
She would let the radiation do the heavy lifting for her.
The Butcher's Table
The clinic smelled of rot masked by aggressive sage incense. Pipes ran along the ceiling, sweating a cold condensation that dripped into buckets filled with bloody rags. The sound of the drips was rhythmic, a slow clock counting down.
The waiting room was crowded with the casualties of faith. A man in the corner held his arm, which was slowly turning to gray, porous stone—the result of a failed construction miracle that had petrified his marrow instead of the girder. A woman coughed into a handkerchief, her chest heaving with the wet, rattling sound of Black-Lung. They sat in a silence that was heavy with the Static of their collective, whispered prayers.
Kaelen leaned against the wall, the room spinning in slow, nauseating circles. The blue-green mold on the ceiling seemed to pulse with a life of its own.
"Next," a voice rasped from the back.
Kaelen pushed himself off the wall. He stumbled past the stone-armed man, whose skin felt cold and abrasive as Kaelen's coat brushed him.
The treatment room was hot, filled with the hum of a small, inefficient Resonance generator. Doc sat behind a desk made of stacked engine crates. He was a small man with a permanent tremor in his left hand—the mark of a Projector who had pushed the Dictum too far and suffered the Dissonance.
His mind was a fractured glass, held together by greed and cheap Ether.
"Sit," Doc said, not looking up from a ledger.
Kaelen sat on a wooden stool. The wood groaned under him. He placed the velvet pouch on the crates.
Doc opened it. He used iron tongs to lift one of the violet shards. He held it up to the light of a flickering oil lamp, his optical lens whirring as it zoomed in on the black veins of decay within the crystal.
"Dirty," Doc sneered. He dropped the shard back into the pouch with a dismissive clack. "This is raw runoff from a fear-engine. It's volatile, Kael. If I try to refine this, it'll blow my kiln and take half the block with it. It's garbage."
"It has potency," Kaelen argued. His voice scraped like sandpaper against the roof of his mouth.
"It has cancer," Doc corrected. He looked at Kaelen's face. He saw the burns. The missing hair. The graying, clouded eyes. "And so do you. You've been walking in the Canker, haven't you? Looking for Old Tech? Or just looking for a way out?"
Doc leaned back, the chair creaking like a dying animal. "I don't treat ghosts, Kael. It's bad for business. People see a man like you walking out of my shop, they think I'm a heretic. Or worse, a failure. Go die in the Sumps."
"I need a scrub," Kaelen said." And a blockers shot. Now."
"A scrub costs ten clean shards. You brought me radioactive waste."
Kaelen closed his eyes. The logic was sound. He had brought bad currency to a starving man. He reached into his belt. He didn't pull out the Cylinder; that was his leverage for the world. Instead, he pulled out the lead apron he had stolen from the corpse in the Holy Zone. He bundled the heavy, gray material onto the desk.
"Lead," Kaelen said. "Real lead. Pre-Somatic. It blocks the Dictum. It blocks the radiation. You can't buy this in the Ribs. You can't even dream it into existence."
Doc went still. The tremor in his hand stopped for a heartbeat. He reached out and touched the apron, his fingers rubbing the material. He muttered a small prayer—a minor weight-cant—and watched as the fabric refused to flatten or respond to the will of the Consensus. It remained stubbornly, physically real.
"True matter," Doc whispered. He looked at Kaelen with a new, dangerous interest.
"Where did you find this?"
"Does it matter?"
Doc hesitated. Greed warred with the fear of the Church in his eyes. Greed won. He swept the pouch and the apron into a drawer.
"Strip to the waist," Doc said, " reaching for a syringe filled with a glowing, viscous blue fluid. "This is going to hurt. I have to use a time-reversal cant to convince your cells they haven't met the light yet. It's a lie, but it's a functional one."
The Loop
Kaelen sat in the recovery alcove, a curtain of stained canvas separating him from the triage.
The scrub had been agony.
Doc's magic had felt like being skinned alive and dipped in salt. It didn't cure the radiation; it just convinced the body it hadn't happened yet, pushing the biological consequences forty-eight hours into the future. It was a stay of execution.
He buttoned his shirt with trembling fingers. The nausea was gone, replaced by a deep, hollow hunger. On the other side of the curtain, a young girl sat on a cot. She couldn't have been more than ten. She was rocking back and forth, her hands clamped over her ears, her eyes squeezed shut.
Her mother, a gaunt woman with soot-stained skin and a frayed prayer-shawl, held her shoulders.
"Make it stop," the girl whimpered. "The walls are screaming. They won't stop singing."
"Hush, Elara," the mother pleaded. "It's just the morning prayer. The Accord keeps us safe. It keeps the air in the room."
"It's too loud," Elara cried. "It's like needles."
Echo-Sickness. The child was sensitive. She could hear the ambient pressure of the Consensus—millions of people believing the same lie at once. For the faithful, it was a comfort. For Elara, it was a physical assault.
Kaelen watched them through a gap in the canvas. He should leave. He had his treatment. He had the Cylinder. Logic dictated he vanish into the shadows.
But the girl's screaming was a sharp, repetitive sound that drilled into his own skull, harmonizing with the Static he fought every day.
He stood up. The floorboards creaked.
Elara looked up. Her eyes were wide, the pupils blown dilation-black. She looked at Kaelen and stopped rocking. Her breathing hitched.
"You're quiet," she whispered.
The mother looked at Kaelen, fear flaring in her eyes. She pulled the girl closer. "Sir, please. She's unwell. We've paid for our time."
Kaelen ignored the mother. He looked at the girl. He knew why she found him quiet. He was a Null. He was a void in the noise. To her, he must have looked like a silhouette of pure silence.
"The noise is a loop," Kaelen said softly. "It repeats because they are afraid to stop."
Elara blinked. "It hurts."
Don't listen to the words," Kaelen said.
"Count the gaps. Between the hum, there is a silence. Find it."
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, rusted nut he kept as a fidget. He held it out on his palm.
"Focus on this. It has six sides. It is heavy. It is real. The noise is just air. This is iron."
Elara reached out. Her small fingers closed around the cold metal. She squeezed it. She closed her eyes, her brow furrowing.
"Six sides," she whispered.
Her breathing slowed. The rocking stopped. The physical reality of the object gave her mind an anchor, a truth to hold against the lie of the room.
"Thank you," the mother breathed, looking at Kaelen as if he were a priest of a god she didn't recognize.
"Keep the nut," Kaelen said. "It's cheap."
The Seal
Kaelen turned to the door. Doc walked out of the back room, wiping blood from his hands on a rag. He stopped near the entryway, where a massive acoustic horn was mounted to the wall—a receiver for the Church's daily sermons.
The horn crackled to life with a burst of static. Then, the chime of a silver bell.
"Citizens of the Ribs," a voice boomed. It was smooth, rich, and amplified by the Resonance.
It was a live projection from the Crown.
Kaelen froze. His hand hovered over the door latch.
"A sickness has been detected in Sector 4," the voice continued. "A corruption of the soul. An agent of chaos has violated the Holy Zone and stolen a sacred relic."
Doc looked at Kaelen. His eyes flicked to the drawer where the lead apron lay. His hand moved toward a hidden bell under the counter.
"To ensure the safety of the Consensus,"
the voice intoned, "the High Council has authorized a purification. All transit from District 9 is suspended. The blast doors are sealing now."
A deep, metallic thud vibrated through the floor. It came from the west—the sound of massive bulkheads slamming shut on the access bridges. The entire district shuddered, the chains groaning under the sudden shift in pressure.
"The White-Bloods have been deployed," the voice said, dropping an octave. "We will find the infection. We will burn it out. Do not harbor the heretic. Faith is transparency."
The horn clicked off.
Silence rushed back into the room, heavy and suffocating. Doc stared at Kaelen. The tremor in his hand worsened. He reached into his pocket, his fingers curling around a scalpel.
"You didn't say they were closing the gates," Doc whispered.
"I didn't know," Kaelen said. He didn't move his hand toward his own knife. He just watched Doc's eyes.
"You need to leave," Doc said. "Now. Before I remember I'm a citizen of the Accord."
Kaelen nodded. He opened the door.
Outside, the smog had changed color. The usual gray was tinged with a faint, pulsing red light reflecting off the clouds. Searchlights. The district was sealed. The White-Bloods were sweeping the streets. And somewhere out there, Vesper was hunting a signal he no longer emitted.
He touched the cylinder in his pocket. It was useless without the Manual. The Manual was in the vault. The vault was guarded by the very monster chasing him.
He couldn't run. He couldn't hide. Logic dictated that when you cannot defeat a superior force, you must change the nature of the conflict. He didn't need a weapon. He needed an army. Or perhaps, he just needed the one person in the city who hated the Church as much as he did.
Kaelen looked at the red sky.
"Enemy of my enemy," he whispered.
It was a terrible plan. It was statistically probable to result in death.It was the only variable left.